[HICHE] ADKoPD: Episode 12, Creeps in the Deeps

This story is billed as a crossover between My Little Pony and Stargate Atlantis, but as you’ve probably noticed, I’m also including snippets of other media in minor or short-lived roles. Why? Well, because I’m a fan of those things too, and tying them all together is neat to do. In fact, this episode’s entire existence is rooted in something related to neither Stargate nor MLP. Welcome, friends, to Episode 12 of “A Different Kind of Pegasus Device”.

[G-Docs Chapter Link – Creeps in the Deeps]

This is gonna be an easy one, because I’ll warn you now, I have a setup but no real content. We begin our story with the chapter “Called Upon”, a joke on how those who have a song about offering help are in this story the ones asking for it. The last time we saw the Sea Ponies who inhabit the oceans around Atlantis was all the way back in “Enemy in the Sky”, episode 5, when they pulled Rainbow out of the sinking Wraith Cruiser, and they’ve been keeping to themselves ever since. Until now. So remember how Atlantis ripped itself off the ocean floor with a jolt from its engines in episode 2 and I said there would be consequences for it later? Apparently, there’s been this giant dark Pit (based on a Bionicle location of the same name associated with the song the episode’s title references), a large cavern underneath the seafloor that only opens into the above world at one point, wherein live the nastiest and most dangerous creatures that once swam freely in the planet’s oceans and posed a major threat to the sea ponies. After settling here, the Lantean crystal ponies helped the sea ponies corral the creatures into this underwater cave to protect both of them, setting up a partnership of mutual help in times of need. This Pit was sealed off by gifts from the Lanteans, a set of six colored key rings placed on pedestals surrounding the lone entrance, which together projected an energy barrier. However, Atlantis rocketing itself free caused an earthquake that knocked these key rings out of place, and they drifted down into the Pit, which has been sitting open ever since. These key rings are copies of the McGuffin items from the short-lived LEGO Atlantis toyline featuring divers looking for the sunken city and finding giant sea creatures guarding these key ring artifacts, which I’m sure totally by coincidence and not theft of intellectual property features a near-literal Stargate portal in the biggest set of its first wave, but let’s actually go underwater before getting too far ahead.

After the sea ponies get Atlantis’ attention and relay the above info after exhausting their own ideas to solve it alone and getting over their uncertainties of if Atlantis’ new residents would stay true to the former tenants’ promises, Twilight sets to work planning an underwater expedition. In an unnamed chapter, her initial idea is to pull out her season 4 Breezie transformation spell to turn several team members into sea ponies, but only gets as far as Lyra before Amber Waves arrives with an alternate solution. Following on a subplot of the last few episodes I’ve neglected to mention, a second, smaller Jumper Bay had been found in the North Pier of the city in the wake of the ZPM’s arrival turning on new systems, but the three new Jumpers found inside are nonstandard. It’s realized this episode that that’s because their engines and shields are meant for working underwater instead of in air or space, and the Bay only opens underwater. In SGA, the Bay exists, but all Jumpers already work okay underwater, their shields just run out rather quickly so missions have to be quick. This story’s ‘Ocean Jumpers’ are amazing under the sea, and also have a sonar system that projects a 3D landscape onto the windshield HUD to navigate from in the pitch black ocean depths, while SGA was boring and just taped spotlights under them. Twilight instead gives the rest of the ponies a semi-aquatic form that will only kick in when they’re in water, just in case they’re forced out of the Jumpers during the mission. Lyra will join the local sea ponies in accompanying the Jumpers from the outside, who will offer any knowledge or aid they can. Speaking of the locals, a big subplot of the episode focuses around how Sea Swirl the background unicorn has a name that sounds like it would fit a sea pony, so naturally I created a sea pony OC named Seaswirl that looks like her, and both are on the mission. The two immediately get into a standoffish argument over who better deserves the name, and you can probably already guess their character arcs over the impending story. Or at least the intended arcs they would have had if I’d gotten around to writing them out.

It’s at this point that the setup gives way to the fact that I don’t have a plan for what happens or how it resolves. I was intending for this whole big adventure through the deeps with the Jumper teams getting split up and running across the creatures and key rings separately, Sea Swirl and Seaswirl being caught alone and forced to cooperate, etc., but I always said I’d hammer it out tomorrow and now we’re here. All I have to show for it is a vague outline mostly decided while writing this summary. Before all that, however, I think I’ll discuss the monsters for a bit. While the Pit is probably also inhabited by the likes of the “there’s always a bigger fish” nightmare beasts of Naboo’s deep ocean, the ones we’re focusing on can be found by scouring a Google Images page on the LEGO Atlantis sets. Mostly black with a secondary color, covered in arcane line patterns, and many times oversized compared to a minifigure (to be taken as an accurate relative size in this story), the monsters here were created by the key rings falling to ordinary animals and melding onto their backs or foreheads. The origin for this was actually a separate idea I had long before this story that adapted a monster-summoning motif from Dinosaur King onto the LEGO Atlantis story (an idea which also included the line’s humanoid Atlantean guardians and signature attacks for each beast that didn’t make the transition) and I felt this story would be the perfect opportunity to fit part of that idea into something I was actually writing down. Insert irony. Each creature has its own name and personality (all in the draft) and skills that create unique difficulties to retrieving its ring (sadly, retrievals not in the draft). It’s really a shame I didn’t have the chance to develop them more, they’d have been the best part of the episode.

The draft then descends into a less coherent but slightly longer version of the following few sentences with tentative chapter placements. In “Under the Swirling Sea”, the group finds the crab, but it flees, the shark then attacking and scattering the Jumper teams. “Under Pressure” finds Sea Swirl’s Jumper in a jam as the snapping turtle attacks, Rainbow’s team chases a speedy stingray into the waiting clutches of a squid, and Lyra’s team is caught between the shark and a Reaper Leviathan from Subnautica. After each retrieving their key rings during unwritten scenes, one team finds the master key ring untouched, but a sea snake grabs and is mutated by it, slipping away and leading them into running into the other teams. However, in “There’s Always a Bigger Fish”, the sea snake drops its key ring onto the crab, who then mutates further into a prehistoric sea scorpion to act as the final boss. In the end, the final key rings are retrieved and the heroes escape. The rings are used to reactivate the seal, but while in the Pit, one team of sea ponies had also discovered a special variant of the glowing yellow lightstones they brought with them for illumination: white lightstones whose glow drives away aggressive sea creatures, stealing the sunstones right out of Dinotopia. These may get mentioned in the future.

Something I’ll touch upon later is technology versus magic in this universe. The Crystal Ponies were always a big tech society, using energy fields and crystal gadgetry jargon to do everything, but over time began adapting to magic, these key rings being an early step, and therefore prone to unintended consequences when misused (remember Sunset with the Element of Magic?), hence them easily mutating sea life in this episode. Join us next time as the Expedition suddenly finds itself facing their biggest challenge yet, a full-scale Wraith attack, in “Valley of Lost Dreams”.